


Where Logic Fails Us

by olddognewtrix



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (sort of), F/F, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Omniscient 3rd Person narrator, Time Loop, Time Travel, Time Travel Break-it, Unhappy Ending, what if canon but worse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:48:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28215720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/olddognewtrix/pseuds/olddognewtrix
Summary: Martin Blackwood has one task - make it make sense. As to what that means, well, causality must be observed in any world where linear time rules supreme.Time breaks and is reforged, our hero is scarred more deeply than ever before, and the Eye drinks it all in.Or: the one in which the good guys win.
Relationships: Georgie Barker/Melanie King, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	Where Logic Fails Us

**Author's Note:**

> So - please heed the 'Unhappy ending' tag up there, and the major character death.
> 
> This is a new/anonymous account where I'm posting fics I don't really want tied to me, this one fits the category because a) I'm fairly out of practice with writing so it's probably not going to be good and b) it's not a nice fic? like this is the result of me speculating about what the canon unhappy ending will be as well as the plethora of time-travel fix-its and going 'uh huh well what if i took both of those and made it worse'.
> 
> This chapter is intentionally short, and doesn't make that much sense, its more of a preview.
> 
> This will update whenever I feel like it.

The story goes as thus. A man signs a contract, sells his humanity to the powers that have always been, and evolves into something rather more dangerous. He has friends at one point. They die and they learn to hate him before they die. It doesn’t lessen his need to save them in any way and he runs into danger time and time again because he will burn himself to warm them (and to sate his own desperate, supernatural curiosity). He is consumed by the Rot, is chased by a Stranger’s painfully familiar face. He shakes hands with the Flames, falls through Space, and on and on and on until he is standing on a beach calling to the man he loves, the only one of those friends he has left. The man he loves comes back. He saves him and dooms everyone else.  
Knowing the devil is not enough to save him, he speaks the unthinkable into being. A door that has always been at least a little ajar opens fully and nightmares come tearing the world into neat pieces. Our hero wanders the broken world, his lonely lover at his side. He is marked deeper and deeper and the cuts hurt less and less as each last vestige of the man he was is shredded until all that’s left is a hand in his and a headache and the loss of himself whenever he steps out of the gaze of the eye that is ever trained on him.  


He knows then, how his story ends.  


They wind their way on, to what used to be London and the King on his cobwebbed throne. He burns easily, his purpose served. His archives crumble and his panopticon falls.  


There are rituals and there are rituals. They are, in the end, all about the presentation. The fear, the mystery, the shattering windows, the occult chanting, the blood sacrifices and dark stars and the dance and the circus and the elegant construction of it all.  
The burning of the archives, the loss of the library of fear. The presence of those who have rejected the ever-present fears beyond what should be possible. The panopticon falls, the door closes.  
Martin Blackwood holds onto Jonathan Sims as he sobs tears of blood in the ruins of the Archives that represent him.

When constructing a logical argument, one starts with axioms or assumptions and draws from them to arrive at a conclusion. We examine a moment of rebeginning and assume the following:  


Axiom the first: the Archivist is a thing of Beholding. It lives, is sustained and sustains in turn that Fear. Without it, there is no Archivist.  


Axiom the second: Where there is the Eye, there is the accumulation of fearful knowledge. Where there is the Eye, there is the Archive. Where there is the Archive, there is the Archivist.  


Axiom the third: In the world that has ended, time and space do not make sense. Events in one individual’s future may influence another’s past and so on and so forth. There are no straight lines.  


Axiom the fourth: In the world that has rebegun, events progress linearly.  


Axiom the fifth: The door must be shut.  


Axiom the sixth: A door that is shut that is a door no more is a wall.  


Axiom the seventh: The Archivist shut the door.  


Axiom the eighth: The Archivist is the door is the crack is the wall is the boundary between worlds.  


Axiom the ninth: The door is shut. The wall is built. The Archivist is the wall.  


Axiom the tenth: The Eye has blinked. The Eye cannot see. The Eye is blind is gone.  


The issue is clear – even within the facts, within our axioms of this bold new reality, we have a contradiction. No wall without the Archivist, no Archivist without the Eye, no Eye with the wall. So long as there is the Eye, there must be the Archivist. If there is no Eye, there must be no Archivist and there must be a wall therefore there must be the Archivist who is the wall. If there is an Eye, then there must be an Archivist and there must be a wall and there must be no Eye. The contradictions and convolutions abound, unresolvable in the space between one reality and the next.  


The axioms must be shifted, the path must diverge.  


Martin Blackwood is flung through time on a wave of illogicality.


End file.
